Mo Corston-Oliver, M.A.

mo dot corstonoliver at gmail dot com

Citizenship: US & Canada, NZ permanent resident

Location: Auckland, New Zealand

SUMMARY:

I am a linguist with interests in semantics, the syntax/semantics interface, cognitive linguistics, computational linguistics, and empirical (corpus) methods. I can be hired on a contract basis for projects large or small, academic or commercial, relating to language and computing.

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE:

Partner, Butler Hill Group (2000-2007)

Primarily responsible for many day-to-day technical and business operations of this contracting group, including marketing, sales, and information technology. Managed up to 100 part- and full-time contractors working on various projects in multi-lingual computational linguistics, including development, syntactic annotation, corpus collection, lexicography, software testing, human-subjects usability experiments, market analysis, and evaluation of machine translation systems.

Lexicographic Consultant, Butler Hill Group (1997-2000)

Contracted to Microsoft Corporation's Natural Language Procession Research group; developed tools and procedures for evaluating automatically constructed lexical knowledge networks. Managed multiple projects requiring human annotation of data for the development of Gold-Standard datasets and corpora; designed and implemented experiments in various subfields of computational linguistics, from speech processing to human-computer interaction; performed data analysis.

French Department, UC-Berkeley (Spring 1997)

GRADUATE STUDENT RESEARCHER: Under Dr. Suzanne Fleischman, prepared database of academic references in sociolinguistics in both English and French.

Psychology Department, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina (1989-90)

RESEARCH TECHNICIAN: Under the management of Dr. Lynn Hasher, I managed a lab in cognitive psychology. Responsibilities included data collection and analysis, database management, computer programming, drafting and editing papers and proposals, staff management, and financial management.

VOLUNTEER WORK:

The Robert W Hass Salon, Seattle (2005)

WEBMASTER: Created a site (from Publisher template) for The Robert W Hass Salon, linked to vanity domain and BCentral scheduling service

Talent Identification Program, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina  (1995-2001)

NATIONAL ADVISORY BOARD MEMBER: Advised this internationally recognized program on academic, philosophical, and development, and fiscal issues.

FrameNet Project (1998-1999)

VOLUNTEER RESEARCH ASSISTANT: Worked on theoretical, data, and technical issues related to building a large-scale lexicographic resource, including building, documenting, and maintaining software tools and verifying the accuracy of manually generated data.

Lions Sight and Hearing Foundation (1998)

VOLUNTEER PROGRAMMER: Built a custom database (MS-ACCESS) application for managing financial information, including initial consultation/needs analysis, structuring data, handling user-interface issues, controlling for data integrity, building integrated reports & mergers with data from other applications in the Office suite, writing documentation, and doing extensive training and user support.

TEACHING EXPERIENCE:

Linguistics Department, Berkeley (1999)

TEACHING ASSISTANT: Taught 3 sections of The Mind and Language: Introduction to Cognitive Linguistics under Prof. Eve Sweetser.

Winchester Thurston School, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. (1991-95)

TEACHER: Taught 9th grade, 10th grade, 12th grade, and AP English courses. Served as academic advisor to a number of students and was faculty sponsor of the poetry and ski clubs as well as the student literary magazine. Served on various faculty committees, including representative to the Board of Trustees (1993-95).

Educational Testing Service and The College Board (Summers 1994-1999)

ESSAY READER: Read and evaluated student essays for the AP test in English literature.

Durham County Board of Education, Durham, North Carolina. (1991-92)

TEACHING INTERN: Taught 2-5 high school English classes daily as part of a graduate program, under the supervision of a mentor teacher at Southern High School.

Talent Identification Program, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina (1985-92)

INSTRUCTOR: (Summer 1992) Taught "satire" to gifted 7th-8th graders in a pilot program on the campus of Davidson University. Designed curricula, supervised activities.

TEACHING ASSISTANT: (Summers 1985-87) Assisted in teaching Latin and Writing to gifted 7th-10th grade students.

EDUCATION:

University of California, Berkeley, Linguistics, M.A. (1997)

Coursework and research focusing on cognitive and computational syntax and semantics. Activities include participation in the Berkeley Linguistics Society, the Berkeley Women and Language Group, and FrameNet.

Duke University, 1990-91. M.A.T., Dec. 1991, English.

Relevant course work included educational psychology, educational methods, British, American, and world literature. Degree requirements included a full-year teaching internship at Southern High School, Durham, NC. Honors included a graduate fellowship, full tuition, merit-based.

Duke University, 1985-89. A.B., cum laude, Dec. 1989.

Anthropology (linguistics) and English (linguistics) majors. Relevant course work included British literature, cultural anthropology, history, Ancient Greek, German, English and Slavic linguistics, semiotics, and philosophy. Honors included Dean's List with Distinction and the A.B. Duke Memorial Scholarship, full tuition, merit-based, renewed for four years.

SKILLS:

Languages:

Reading proficiency in French; some Latin, German, Classical Greek, Spanish, Swahili

Writing:

Writing of all kinds (academic, technical documentation), copyediting

Computer Applications:

Operating Systems: Windows, Macintosh, Unix.

Word Processing: MS Word (expert)

Spreadsheet: MS Excel (advanced)

Database: MS Access (advanced)

Layout: Pagemaker (basic)

          Web Design: FrontPage (advanced)

Computer Programming:

Visual Basic (Office Suite integration; custom Access and Excel applications), HTML, Perl, CGI scripting, some C++, some SQL.

PUBLICATIONS AND PRESENTATIONS:

Corston-Oliver, Monica (2001). Central meanings of polysemous prepositions: Challenging the assumptions. Poster presented at the International Conference on Cognitive Linguistics, Santa Barbara, CA, July 22-27. Full text

Pinkham, Jessie, Monica Corston-Oliver, Martine Smets, and Martine Pettenaro (2001). Rapid assembly of a large-scale French-English MT system. To appear in the Proceedings of the MT Summit VIII.

Richardson, Stephen D., William B. Dolan, Arul Menezes and Monica Corston-Oliver (2001). Overcoming the customization bottleneck using example-based MT.  Proceedings of the Workshop on Data-Driven Machine Translation, ACL 2001.

Pinkham, Jessie and Monica Corston-Oliver (2001). Adding domain specificity to an MT system. Proceedings of the Workshop on Data-Driven Machine Translation, ACL 2001.

Ringger, Eric K., Monica Corston-Oliver, and Robert C. Moore (2001). Using word-perplexity for automatic evaluation of machine translation. Unpublished ms.

Corston-Oliver, Monica (2000). Computer assisted linguistics: A corpus study of syntax/semantics interface. Invited presentation, School of Computer Science, Acadia University (Wolfville, Nova Scotia), September 11.

_____ (2000). A cognitive account of the English meronymic by phrase. In Lisa J. Conathan et al, eds. Proceedings of the 26^th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society. BLS: Berkeley, CA. 65-76. Full text

_____ (1999). Edward Wheeler Scripture. In John J. Ohala et al. (eds.), A Guide to the History of the Phonetic Sciences in the United States. University of California, Berkeley. 116.

_____ (1998). The 'white wedding': Metaphors and advertising in bridal magazines. In Wertheim, Bailey, and Corston-Oliver, eds. 141-155. Full text

Wertheim, Suzanne, Monica Corston-Oliver, and Ashlee Bailey, eds. (1998). Engendering Communication: Proceedings of the Fifth Berkeley Women and Language Conference. Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Women and Language Group.

Warner, Natasha, Jocelyn Ahlers, Leela Bilmes, Monica Oliver, Suzanne Wertheim, and Mel Chen, eds. (1996). Gender and Belief Systems: Proceedings of the Fourth Berkeley Women and Language Conference. Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Women and Language Group.  

HOBBIES:

Activities:

Competitive Scrabble (current rating: 1022), pottery, hiking, skiing, weightlifting, birdwatching, reading

Interests:

Giftedness, ethics, pedagogical theory, British literature, women's issues, technology & culture